Setting up your services
SECURITY Security level with Admin permission to configure Products, Services, & Inventory. Refer to Admin security settings.
NAVIGATION > Admin > Features & Settings > Products, Services, & Inventory > Services
NAVIGATION > Admin > Features & Settings > Finance, Accounting & Invoicing > Price List
BEFORE YOU BEGIN Before you can set up services, you must set up service codes. Refer to Service codes.
On this page, you set up the services that are the billing items that are added to recurring services contracts. To open the page, use the path(s) in the Security and navigation section above.
For more information on managing services and service bundles on the Service/Service Bundle Search page, refer to Searching and managing services and service bundles.
About Services and Service Bundles
A service is a defined benefit such as "Mail Hosting", "Disk Backup" or "Virus Checking" for a covered device. You charge a fixed fee per service period (usually monthly), which benefits your customers by providing them with predictable IT support costs. For information on recurring service contracts, refer to Offering your customers a Managed Services business model.
If your company incurs license fees or other vendor-related costs, you can associate a vendor and unit costs with the service to track and report on profitability by service or vendor.
NOTE Services can be combined into service bundles. However, service bundles are always a single billing item. You cannot separate them into their constituent services after the fact. As a best practice, we recommend that you use services.
- To add a new service, click New on the Services page or click New > Service on the Price List page.
To edit an existing service, select Edit Service from the context menu on the Services page, or click the Edit icon on the Price List page.
- Populate or modify the following fields:
- Manual selection (or applying a form template, which counts as manual selection)
- SLA on the device
- SLA on the recurring contract service or service bundle
- SLA on the contract
- Products can be associated with multiple vendors, one of which is designated as the default vendor.
- All other entities that reference a product vendor are associated with one specific vendor (the one from which the item was actually purchased). The field will default to the Product Default Vendor, but additional Product Vendors (associated with the product) and Other Vendors (not associated with the product) are available from the dropdown menu.
- Services can only have one vendor. If you change the vendor of a service, contracts that include the service will reference the new vendor as of the next billing period.
Field Name | Description | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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General | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Name* | This field should be descriptive enough to ensure the correct service is being added to the contract. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Active | Selected by default. Clear this check box to make the service inactive. Inactive services cannot be added to contracts or service bundles, but existing contracts or service bundles are not impacted. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Description |
The Description field appears on many Autotask entities. On entities like ticket, task, note, and to-do, the Description field is a core part of the data record. Wherever it is available, it tracks essential information about the record. This field is often prefaced with the entity name. For example, Quote Description. Enter a detailed description of the entity instance, the issue with which the customer needs help, or the service that they requested. |
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Invoice Description | Enter the description that will appear on invoices. This description can be modified at the contract level to add more information (domain names, etc.). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Service Level Agreement |
The point of an SLA is standardization. A service level is a performance standard that defines the time frame in which an issue will be resolved, based on its severity and impact. A service level agreement is a minimum set of service levels that your company defines to meet the service needs of one or more customers. For example, you promise your customers that critical tickets that impact multiple contacts will be resolved within 8 business hours 90% of the time. For more information on SLAs, refer to Introduction to service level management. You should rarely have to manually select an SLA. If they are correctly set up, SLAs should be applied automatically. If an entity is created from or associated with multiple entities that can default in a service level agreement, the more specific SLA is prioritized over a more general one: This applies also to tickets created in the Client Portal. For more on this complex subject, refer to Applying service level agreements. |
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Vendor Name |
A vendor is an organization whose primary business relationship with your company is to provide goods and services. NOTE When you associate a service with a vendor and provide a Unit Cost, you can track profitability by vendor and report on vendor payments. |
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Manufacturer/Service Provider | This is an optional field that you can use to track a manufacturer or service provider, which may be different than the vendor who supplies the service. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manufacturer/Service Provider Product Number | This is an optional field that you can use to track a manufacturer or service provider product number. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Catalog Number/Part Number | This is an optional field that you can use to track the catalog or part number. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Service SKU | This is an optional field that you can use to track the service SKU. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Internal Service ID | This is an optional field that you can use to track an internal service ID. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
External Service ID | This is an optional field that you can use to track an external service ID. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Service Link (URL) | This is an optional field that you can use to provide a link to a website for the service. The text will appear as a hyperlink. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Billing | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Unit Cost | This field allows you to capture costs of providing a service, such as licensing fees. Unit cost can be edited on the Recurring Contract > Services page. You can enter up to 4 decimals. NOTE Providing the Unit Cost allows you to track recurring service contract profitability. When you provide a Vendor Name as well, you can track Vendor payments. |
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Markup % |
This field appears on entities that are part of the billing workflow. It is hidden from users who do not have permission to view internal cost data. It indicates the difference between Unit Cost and Unit Price as a percentage. When you select the item name, the Markup % field is populated but it can be edited. |
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Unit Price* | This is the default price for the service per billing period and unit. You can enter up to 4 decimals, but note that the Extended Price field on quotes and invoices will be rounded to 2 decimals. If Multi-currency is enabled, the price is always displayed in your internal currency. For information on setting prices in customer currencies, refer to Managing your price list. |
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Period Type* |
The choices are Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annual, and Yearly. When the service/bundle is assigned to a contract, the period type will be used in conjunction with the contract period type to determine the time interval at which the service will be billed. NOTE Once a service/bundle is saved, the Period Type can no longer be edited. • If the service/bundle has a longer billing period type than the contract, the service/bundle will be billed in its entirety. If the service/bundle period type is quarterly and the contract period type is monthly, the service/bundle will be billed for the entire quarter on the next contract billing date. • If the contract billing period is longer, the service/bundle will be billed for the number of times that would have occurred since the last billing. For example, if the service/bundle period type is quarterly and the contract period type is semi-annual, service will be billed twice on the next contract billing date. The table below illustrates the combinations of monthly and quarterly periods for services/bundles and contracts.
Also note that if services are added to a bundle, the bundle's period will always override the periods of the services added. |
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Service Code* | Click the selector icon and select a Service Code. Refer to Service codes. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
User Defined | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Any user-defined fields for the services entity will appear here. Refer to Managing user-defined fields. |
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Click Save & Close.
Changing a field value does the following:
Field Name | Description |
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Name | The name changes in all service bundles and contracts that include the service. |
Description | The description changes in all service bundles and contracts that include the service. |
Invoice Description | The invoice description changes on all future invoices. |
SLA | All tickets associated with the service going forward will have the new SLA applied. The service SLA will override the contract SLA if the service is selected on the ticket. IMPORTANT There is no warning, and the change of contract SLA to service SLA may not be obvious to the user creating the ticket! |
Vendor Name | New contracts will use the new vendor immediately. A pop-up window allows you to optionally apply the new vendor to non-posted services as of an effective date, and separately to posted services as of the effective date. |
Period Type | Cannot be modified. |
Unit Cost | New contracts will use the new unit cost immediately. A pop-up window allows you to optionally apply the new unit cost to non-posted services as of an effective date, and separately to posted services as of the effective date. |
Markup % | Changing the markup will modify the unit price. See below. |
Unit Price | The unit price will not be updated in existing contracts or service bundles. |
Service Code | All unposted billing periods on existing contracts and services in existing bundles are updated. |
Active | If you inactivate a service, it will not be removed from existing service bundles or contracts, but can no longer be selected for new ones. |